Undisclosed millions flooded into the Clinton
Foundation From people tied to a controversial uranium
deal. That gave a Russian backed company Control of one-fifth of the US uranium production This is the story of Uranium One. Welcome to America Uncovered, I’m Chris Chappell. Russia collusion. In US politics, it’s the new black. Everyone’s wearing it. Needless to say you’ve heard about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump colluded with Russia. But the President has also accused his political
opponents of some shady deals with Russia. What was Trump talking about? A scandal involving a company known as Uranium
One. It’s now owned by a Russian backed company
called Rosatom. That purchase gave Russia control of 20% of all the United States uranium production, a national security concern. But the deal sailed through despite security
concerns, at a time when Hillary Clinton was Secretary
of State. And also at that time, millions of dollars flowed into the Clinton Foundation from people
tied to the deal. There’s been some new developments in the
story. At the end of November, the FBI raided the home an FBI contractor
Dennis Cain. According to his lawyer, 16 FBI agents showed up at his house and conducted a 6 hour raid. Cain, according to his lawyer, is a recognized whistleblower protected under the Intelligence Community
Whistleblower Protection Act. Now, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, Cain handed over documents that show “Federal officials failed to investigate
potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian company that purchased
Uranium One.” Not only that, but then FBI Director Robert
Mueller failed to investigate the allegations of criminal
misconduct involving Uranium One. Now, those claims are based on a document that only the Daily Caller has seen, so I haven’t been able to independently
verify it. But Senator Charles Grassley has asked the Inspector General to make the
Cain documents public. So this has been the spark that re-ignited interest in the story of Uranium
One. Get it, spark and re-ignited? What’s that, Shelley? OK, fine, Uranium involves nuclear fission, not sparks or fire. Anyway, what is the real story on Uranium One? Well, as the New York Times says, the story of Uranium One, “underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American
foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation’s donors.” Back in 2005, Bill Clinton travelled to Kazakhstan on the
personal jet of Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra. He ran a small company called UrAsia Energy
Ltd. Now Kazakhstan, is known for only a few things. Most importantly it’s the homeland of Borat. But also, it has a huge amount of uranium deposits. The uranium used in nuclear power plants. And also bombs. And also, Kazakhstan has been run by the same “president” for the past 28 years. Which is always a sign that the “president” is probably closer to
a brutal dictator. Despite that, Bill Clinton “handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup when he expressed support for [his] bid to head an international elections
monitoring group, undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human
rights record by, among others, his wife, then a senator.” Wow, they have a very interesting relationship. “Bill, I am sick and tired of you leaving your socks in the living room, and constantly undermining my foreign policy
objectives.” Just a few days after Bill Clinton and the Canadian mining guy Frank Giustra visited
Kazakhstan, Giustra’s company, UrAsia Energy, signed a deal to buy a large stake in three uranium mines run by the Kazakh state-run uranium agency
Kazatomprom. And a few months later, it just so happened Giustra decided to donate 31.3 million dollars to the Clinton Foundation. “The value of UrAsia shares increased seventyfold between 2005 and 2007.” In February 2007, the head of the Kazakh uranium company Kazatomprom payed a personal visit to Bill Clinton’s
home in New York. The meeting was set up by Giustra. Now, when the New York Times asked Clinton and Giustra about the meeting, they both denied it happened. Until The Times pressed. Then it turned out they remembered the meeting about the future of the nuclear energy industry. But who could forget a few months later when Giustra donated $100 million dollars to Clinton
Foundation. Funny how those donations time up with the Kazakh uranium industry. Anywho, 2007 is also when UrAsia merged with a South African company Uranium
One, to become a new company called, Uranium One. Yeah, I guess that is the better name. Giustra sold his stake in Uranium One, and was replaced by the new chairman, a Canadian stockholder named Ian Telfer. What is it with these Canadians? Anyway, as with any good Canadian, Uranium One began trying to get a piece of the much more delicious American
pie. Under Telfer, Uranium One set out to become “a powerhouse in the United States uranium
sector with the potential to become the domestic
supplier of choice for U.S. utilities.” Uranium One began buying up US assets. Mills in Utah, uranium exploration properties in four Western states, the Energy Metals Corporation and its uranium holdings in Wyoming, Texas and Utah. Now that’s important. That meant Uranium One controlled 20% of the United States uranium production. “The United States gets one-fifth of its electrical power from nuclear plants, it produces only around 20 percent of the uranium it needs, and most plants have only 18 to 36 months
of reserve.” But Uranium One was a Canadian company, so how much harm could it do, right? I mean, if there ever were a problem, they’d apologize to us. But remember how Uranium One had merged with UrAsia, which had used Bill Clinton’s influence to buy stakes in those Uranium mines in Kazakhstan? And how those mines are run by the Kazak state-owned company Kazatomprom? Well, you know who else was trying to get a hold of a lot of uranium? Russia. In 2006, Russia approved a $10 billion dollar plan to its grow uranium
production by 600 percent. And a key player in that plan was the Russian state-owned atomic energy corporation
Rosatom. Boy, if only Rosatom could buy a company like
Uranium One. Not only would that give Russia a stake in
20% of the United States’ uranium production, it would also get them big shares in those nice uranium mines in Kazakhstan. Well, turns out Uranium One was about to run into some problems. In May 2009, the head of Kazatomprom was arrested for illegally selling uranium
to foreign companies, including some owned by Uranium One. And Uranium One stock prices fell by 40%. Wow, what a great opportunity for Russia’s
Rosatom! They bought a 17% stake in Uranium One. How wonderfully timed and purely coincidental! Unless it was part of a Russian power play for control of Kazakh uranium assets. But why stop at 17%? In 2010, Rosatom upped it to a 51% controlling stake in Uranium One. And by 2013, Rosatom had purchased full ownership. It was a great deal for Rosatom. It made them one of the world’s largest
uranium producers, and it brought Russia much closer to the goal of controlling much of the global uranium
supply chain. In fact, Rosatom’s chief executive even told Putin in a staged interview, “Few could have imagined in the past that we would own 20 percent of U.S. reserves.” Yeah, something about Russia, the US, and nuclear energy doesn’t seem to mix. But even Jack Ryan is helpless to stop it. But wasn’t there some kind of resistance to this Russian takeover of a company that
controlled so much American uranium production? Well, in fact, there was. There was lot of concern within the US government, as well as with Uranium One shareholders. But, “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
wrote… that American uranium would be preserved for
domestic use, regardless of who owned it.” And the deal would need a careful review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in
the United States, or CFIUS. It’s made up of powerful members in the
US government, including the attorney general, the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy, and the Secretary of State —who at the time of the deal, was Hillary Clinton. And they all said the deal was a.o.k. Keep in mind, this was during President Obama’s strategic reset of relations with Russia, so he wanted to try and have a good relationship
with Putin. Ultimately, that did not work out. But, you might be concerned that with Hillary Clinton’s position as Secretary
of State, there would a risk that some of her decisions might be influenced by donations to the Clinton
Foundation. Well, don’t worry. First, “Clinton has repeatedly denied any involvement in the State Department’s approval of the Uranium One sale.” And when she became Secretary of State, she had to sign a memorandum that said the Clinton Foundation had to publicly disclose
all contributors. And yeah, it was a little strange that the public disclosure didn’t give exact
amounts, it gave a ranges of contributions, but only one Uranium One official gave to
the Clinton Foundation. It was the chairman, Ian Telfer. And it was small, no more than 250,000, and that was in 2007, before the Rosatom deal was even a twinkle
in Putin’s eye. So that’s that. There’s clearly no connection between Hillary Clinton’s allowing the Uranium One deal to go through, and donations to the Clinton Foundation. Except… by reviewing Canadian tax records, it turned out Telfer actually donated millions of dollars to the Clinton
Foundation. But he did it through his family charity, the Fernwood Foundation. In 2009, Uranium One asked for US embassy to help keep its mines in Kazakhstan. Fernwood Foundation donated a million dollars. In 2010, when the Russians were waiting for CFIUS to approve it’s 51% state in Uranium
one, Fernwood foundation donated a quarter of a
million dollars. That was followed by 600,000 in 2011 and half a million in 2012. Now Uranium One Chairman Ian Telfer denies those donations were anything other
than purely charitable donations. And Hillary Clinton also denies it affected
her decision making. And there is no proof that those donations
did. Just like there’s no proof that the half
million dollars Bill Clinton was paid to give a speech in
Moscow by a government banked Russian investment
bank had any influence over the Rosatom deal getting approved in that same month. Yeah, there’s no proof. It’s all just a little bit shady. And this is the problem when government officials also have charitable
foundations. Why are these people really giving? As a person with knowledge of the Clinton
Foundation’s fund-raising operation told the New York Times, “Why do you think they are doing it — because they love them?” As the New York Times wrote in 2015, “The ultimate authority to approve or reject the Russian acquisition rested with the cabinet
officials on the foreign investment committee, including Mrs. Clinton—whose husband was collecting millions in donations from people associated with Uranium One.” Now a lot of this information first came to
light in the book Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweizer. He’s the Breitbart News senior editor-at-large. So my first thought was, maybe not the most trustworthy of sources. But, all these claims I mentioned were also confirmed and built upon by the
New York Times. So if the Breitbart guy and the New York Times are coming up with the same story, maybe it’s worth taking seriously. There’s more to this story, and we’ll get to that after this quick commercial
break. As early as 2009, “the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were
engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money
laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic
energy business inside the United States.” So it’s hard to imagine that no one involved
with CFIUS knew about the FBI’s evidence on Russia. According to a legal expert interviewed by
Politifact, The FBI “is well represented as part of the Justice Department’s CFIUS
team… It would be somewhat surprising to me if a company was under scrutiny as a buyer
in CFIUS and simultaneously under investigation for
criminal behavior by the FBI, but the criminal investigation was not known to the FBI’s representatives
on CFIUS.” This investigation would have begun under Robert Mueller, then director of the FBI. Now, we have no way to know if Hillary Clinton knew about the FBI investigation. The investigation, by the way, was closed in 2015 by Mueller’s replacement,
James Comey. And Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch put a gag order on one of the key FBI informants
involved. Of course, a possible high level scandal involving Mueller, Comey, the Obama Administration and the Clintons? Trump was all over that, and in 2017, he got his Attorney General Jeff Sessions to remove the gag order, and the informant testified to three congressional
committees. This informant, William Campbell, alleged Russia hired the American lobbying
firm APCO Worldwide to give 3 million dollars to the Clinton Foundation, to help create a favorable environment for the Obama Administration to approve the Uranium
One deal. But Campbell was still unable to provide evidence of quid pro quo, where Hillary Clinton allegedly got the Uranium
One deal passed in exchange for money. And there is cause for some concern over Campbell’s credibility. The Justice Department under the Obama administration “began to have ‘serious credibility concerns’ based on ‘inconsistencies’ between his
testimony and documents they obtained during the investigation.” Campbell also may have had his memory affected by medication he was taking for leukemia. So, is the real story of Russia collusion
one of the Obama Administration and the Clintons? Well, the only thing I can say for sure is, I know President Trump hopes so. Will the recent FBI raid on whistleblower Dennis Cain turn up anything new? The only thing that’s certain is the Uranium One story has a long half life. So what do you think about the Uranium One
deal? Leave your comments below. When I was doing the research on this episode, I actually found a lot of cases where there
seemed to be other possible pay-for-play donations made to the Clinton Foundation. If you’d like to see an episode on that, let me know in the comments! And if you want to see more great episodes of America Uncovered, please the support the show with a dollar
or more per episode on the crowd funding website Patreon. I am promising huge political favors in exchange for cash. Quid pro quo. Once again I’m Chris Chappell, thanks for watching America Uncovered.